A new approach to demand generation - leveraging customers at scale to build a predictable marketing funnel through advocacy and customer nurturing programs.
Activating Customers to Drive Top of Funnel Growth
1. G R E E N H O U S E . I
O
Activating Customers to Drive Growth
Barbra Gago, VP of Marketing @Greenhouse
2. Barbra Gago
VP of Marketing
@Greenhouse
Previously, early-stage SaaS
marketing consultant
Strong background in B2B demand
gen + content
Both fast-growth/startup and
enterprise strategy
3. Greenhouse is a platform that
helps you improve your
recruiting performance.
4. We are in rapid-growth mode
• Product to market mid-2013
• ~ 35 to 105 employees in last 12 months, 185 by EOY
• On track to quadruple our revenue and hit 1k+ customers
• (And marketing is responsible for 70% of the ARR goal!)
8. The opportunity
• Referrals drive 15% of our revenue and convert to customers at a rate of 60%!
• Starting early (before $12M ARR) will help us build and sustain longer-term growth and
increase % of inbound revenue
• We can enrich relationship with customers through automation - Customer Success
can’t scale the 1-1 relationship (many have 100+ customers)
• Building advocacy early will help us build brand leadership and elevate our brand in
the recruiting space (help us become a brand that people want to be associated with)
• We know that referrals are a great source of revenue but as we scale it’s hard to
maintain the channel unless we operationalize it
9. Align with Customers Success to drive engagement
Activate influential customers to grow top of funnel
Leverage customers expertise for product innovation
Support our customers’ professional development
Scale up low-effort – big impact activities
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Our goals
10. Understand the customer life-cycle stages/milestones1
Identify our advocates and their motivations2
Develop a program that balances high touch with scalability3
Our process
12. Advocate personas
The Visionary The Maven
What motivates them to advocate: Status
Access to a rich leadership community
They want help building their personal brand
They want to ‘make’ their career
What motivates them to advocate: Community
They’ve been able to learn from their peers
They want help building their employer brand
They want to share with others
13. High touch program – Advisory Board
What they’ll do for us What we’ll do for them
Spread the word about Greenhouse
Act as a Greenhouse ambassador
Make referrals that result in ARR
Act as references for deals in the pipeline
Speak at events and conferences
Publically endorse in PR and sales collateral
Invite them to our Advisory Board
Visibility/influence on product roadmap
Complimentary consulting services
Exclusive content; strategy reviews, benchmarks
Private workshop events (off-sites) with peers
Exclusive access to beta-testing
Position them as a thought leader (PR)
14. Low touch program – Advocate Hub
What they’ll do for us What we’ll do for them
Comment on articles or blogs
Shout-out on social media
Reviews on directory sites, etc.
Case study / testimonial
Host a meet-up or user group
Reference call
Access to private VIP dinners / events
Feature in blog and newsletter
Launch kits (repeat customers)
Access to community / mentor program
Job posting credits
Industry and Greenhouse event passes
Exclusive swag + resources
Create a ‘pull’ system for customers to opt-in to activities and get appropriate rewards
15. Start early. If you have a customer you should be thinking about this.
Hire someone to own this.
‘Enable’ Customer Success as you would enable Sales
Ask your customers what they want. Don’t assume.
Find the low-hanging fruit and focus on that.
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Getting started
Prior to joining Greenhouse I worked with several early-stage stage tech companies to build and scale the marketing infrastructure
I’ve always been doing B2B – I come from the marketing automation space – in the early days (a company called Genius) and so lots of experience with ‘modern’ demand gen and content marketing
I’ve worked both internally and externally as a consultant for start-ups as well as enterprise
We work with companies like Uber, Airbnb, pinterest…
We are a platform that helps you design and scale your recruiting process and get the data and metrics along the way to iterate so your continuously getting better at recruiting!
Like marketing, recruiting is all about the funnel – so our platform is really built to help you optimize that
Product to market in 2013
Ended 2013 with about 30 customers
Marketing goal is big so scalability and predictability is going to be really important in terms of what we focus on from a marketing perspective
We see the funnel like this…
Once you become a customer there’s almost a mirrored funnel – and our goal from a marketing and demand generation perspective is to get you through that funnel and coming out advocating on the other side!
- Many of the principals from lead nurturing then can be applied to the customer funnel // the more advocate the more, quality leads end up in the top of the funnel
Nurturing and success vs. advocacy (in product / during product life cycle stages vs. outside product programs)
Nurturing and success vs. advocacy (in product / during product life cycle stages vs. outside product programs)
Understand the customer life-cycle stages; what does a ‘successful’ customer look like? What was their path? How can we map content/training to that process and speed up success?
(Customer life-cycle nurturing in parallel to advocacy) >> how do we partner with customers success to improve NPS, product mastery, success and engagement?
Identify who our biggest advocates are and what motivates them; interviewed ~ 30 customers, combed through all our NPS data, did some research
Develop a program that balances high-touch w/ scale
Going to cover some highlights from our advocate program (not getting into customer nurture)
We found that after the initial on-boarding sessions customers didn’t remember all the best practices we covered. We designed a webinar series as a phase one – to kick off 3-4 weeks after their on-boarding, and occur once a week for 6 weeks and refresh customers on the key areas of greenhouse – how best to use them and what our other customers are doing //
We are also working on a best practices nurture for hiring managers who generally don’t get all the same product training as the key users – and on-boarding through role-based nurture tracks
We are working to develop more in-product engagement as well – but focused on the content / success path first (and doing it outside the product) and then will start to develop within
Exclusive swag + resources; cupcakes, donations (as thank you’s), books, guides, etc.
Understanding what motivates them – map asks with proper rewards (use technology where you can – influivitive)
Nurturing and success vs. advocacy (in product / during product life cycle stages vs. outside product programs)